One Often-Neglected Source Of Brilliant Business Ideas - Proving Academia's Relevance In The Entrepreneurial World

Finding new ideas and products is one of the biggest jobs of any investor or entrepreneur. They're the lifeblood of your business; without ideas, you're just another bland, faceless shell, doing the same thing that everyone else does. But if you're a smart business owner, you've spent some time thinking about the following question:

Where do new ideas and products come from?

Today I want to show you a corner of the world that most people overlook when they search for ideas. I'm talking about academia.

“What?” you might sputter, “But that's the last place I'd ever look for business expertise! They don't know the first thing about turning a profit!” Consider a few facts:

FedEx started as a college term paper by Fred Smith. He didn't actually get a “C” on it (as per persistent legend) but it was an assignment for a class.

A joint project at Stanford led to the creation of the
Google algorithm.

Jim Clark called on his Stanford buddies when he founded Silicon Graphics, Inc., before creating Netscape.

These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to huge business empires that got their start in school.

It makes sense when you think about it. One of the great things about universities is that students and professors are not under the same pressure to make an immediate profit that businesspeople are. There is incredible pressure, yes, but the pressure is to learn and create knowledge rather than take something safe and reliable to market.

It's not just new products or inventions like FedEx and Google, either. We're talking about smarter business practices, new market research, hiring and firing data, stuff that could save corporations millions of dollars if they got their hands on it.

There's a problem, though.

The vast majority of academic business research never makes it into the hands of people who can use it. Instead, dissertations sit on coffee tables gradually collecting dust and wine stains from the occasional dinner party.

Why? Where's the disconnect here?

That's the question that Dr. Cheryl Lentz has been tackling for the past few years.

Dr. Lentz (more commonly known as “The Academic Entrepreneur”) is one of the few people who has crossed over from the business world to academia and back again. As an entrepreneur, publisher, author, and professor, she is a faculty member at Walden University and the creator of The Refractive Thinker, a business-focused academic journal.

With a foot in each camp, Dr. Lentz has seen incredible discoveries occur in the world of academic research . . . only to watch them fizzle and burn out when it comes time to tell people about them.

“When you speak at a business conference, and people see a 'Dr.' in front of your name, people immediately tune out,” says Dr. Lentz. “They assume that because you have an advanced degree, whatever you're going to talk about is going to be stiff, dry, and boring. To be honest, they're not often wrong.”

There's a language barrier between the academic world and the realm of business, one that The Refractive Thinker helps break down.

“We take a chapter of each contributor's work, and assemble them by theme. Each theme gets its own volume, and if it's particularly popular then we put together another volume to expand upon it. It's like a translation; we're translating the works of academics into language that entrepreneurs are comfortable with. We're making it useful for them.”

It's a win-win situation for the authors, too. With the cutthroat competition in the academic world and the need to publish, The Refractive Thinker is an outlet for many people who would otherwise struggle to be published. And it can be a bridge-builder, a way for them to forge connections in the business world that they wouldn't otherwise get.

“I'm always encouraging my students to approach things from an entrepreneur's mindset. Maybe that makes me a bit of a rogue academic, but in today's economy they can't afford not to,” says Dr. Lentz.

So what's the point?

The point is that as entrepreneurs, we face all sorts of challenges. Often we rely on our own creative energies to solve every problem, forgetting that other people have had (and solved) the very same problems that we have now. This is especially true when we have only one group of friends, read only one group of blogs, and rely on only one type of analysis.

Don't be afraid to step outside of your normal echo chamber when you're looking for ideas—this is exactly when you should step outside of it! Take a moment, read an academic journal. Don't be afraid of unfamiliar language.

You might just find the solution to your problem (or your next hit product) staring you right in the face.